Today I remembered a childhood friend of mine named Sara, a girl my age who lived a little way down the street.

She was an inveterate bookworm just like me, so we got along wonderfully. One entire room of her house was nothing but books of every size and description, stacked in shelves along the walls from floor to ceiling. When I found out, I was totally blown away and wouldn`t stop coming over every chance I got, even though it was a longish bicycle ride away.

One weekend afternoon as I was over at her house engrossed in her dad`s collection of vintage MAD magazines, she came up to me with a clipboard in hand and a proud look on her face. `I wrote a story, would you like to read it?`

Both of her parents were doctors, so they had a large collection of medical textbooks and reference materials, which I`m guessing were a major influence on the story she came up with-- five sheets of paper, filled in an eight-year-old`s very neat block printing with something I can only describe as The Baby-sitters Club ⚠️ ↗ meets Bates` Guide to Physical Examination ⚠️ ↗.

It was about the main characters of that children`s book series, a bunch of middle-school girls, and their visit to the doctor... unfortunately I no longer remember much of the details, but I can vividly recall one sentence of that story, which sums it up magnificently:

Kristy screamed as the catheter was inserted.

(I`m not making this up, I promise)

Sara and I had already engaged in some innocent exploration of each other`s bodies when we were younger, and I`d been through her parents` medical books too looking for the naked pictures (there were so many, and such explicit ones, that it stopped being exciting after a while), so I didn`t really think much of it at the time; I think my reaction was something akin to `cool story bro`.

But now, looking back, that was an amazing achievement for a kid of any age, wasn`t it? I wonder how many children have ever written anything that could pass as a work of erotica?

I found out much later that she`d shown her story to her parents too, and in her own words, `I guess I`m lucky I have awesome parents... they encouraged me to keep writing instead of completely losing their shit over their perverted little girl`

We still keep in touch, and I think she turned out pretty awesome herself. She grew up to become a very young Ph.D., a university professor, and a regular contributor to anthologies of erotic fiction (of all sorts-- she`s gained a reputation among friends as being absolutely immune to squicking out)